Profligate leftist prostitution partying from who knows where. || "It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality." -- JG Ballard. || "You try running with your sagging breasts down the middle of the fucking street. People will throw a blanket over you. And grab you. And call the police. For fuck's sake." -- Germaine Greer.

No, in what has become customary for the heads of the security services, Hannigan has stepped out of the dark momentarily to have a whinge about Snowden, make a barely veiled request for more powers, despite having tapped the cables that make up the backbone of the internet, and to insult those who've responded to these blanket powers of surveillance with a renewed focus on encryption. Rather than wonder if maybe they went a little too far with experiments such as the interception of Yahoo webcam chats, the blame is put squarely on the companies with a duty to protect their users' data. Without mentioning any corporate behemoth by name, Hannigan directs his ire at Silicon Valley in general, complaining they have become like it or not the command and control nexus for terrorists. Moreover, their customers also won't understand if they fail to cooperate, ahead as they are when it comes to taxation and so forth.

There is you see no absolute right to privacy. When someone in a position of power comes out with such a ridiculous statement, as though it had been suggested there was, and then in the next sentence says how GCHQ is happy to be part of a mature debate, the only conclusion to be reached is this is deliberate. The security services' idea of debate prior to now has been to neither confirm or deny anything, threaten the Guardian with prior restraint, and then whisper about how terrorists had all changed their methods as a result of Snowden's whistleblowing. Their take on oversight, meanwhile, is being able to see the questions beforehand. And now they want that mature debate, itself a funny definition of mature when their opening argument is Facebook, Twitter and the rest are terrorist and paedophile enablers unless things go back the way they were, with back doors and nods and winks? The only pity is Hannigan's invocation of democracy, a concept the securocrats have long had a problem with, won't be seen for the joke it is.